Why are all symbols of femininity about getting pierced?
It was not enough when my ears were first punctured
(two bright pricks of blood under fluorescent lighting / two quick clicks from the employee’s gun)
Nor the second
(hollowed steel sterilized under a man’s hand / rough like how each piece of wood has its own grain
and steady like yellowed fingers grasping their third cigarette)
Not enough when the ink covered needles pushed into my fragile flesh
(blood / ink / plasma squeezing through a mesh of skin)
Not enough now, arrows tearing through my rib cage
(their wood like the hand of a man / who has held a plow every day for the past thirty years / who
wakes up before dawn just to go hungry)
it didn’t take
For as they interr my body into the Earth it is she who is pierced and not I
(as if the world was saying “born a man, die a man”)
(as if I had not bled again and again / as if I was not pierced again and again)
